Jon,

Dashboard widgets support full 2D rendering library so you can make them look as close to a real app as possible. Also, not sure if you already knew this but, you can actually drag your widgets off the dashboard.

Just pick a new widget from the selection panel (the one that appears when you click the + sign on the bottom right of the dashboard) and keep holding down the mouse button while pressing F12 to hide the dashboard. You should now be able to place the widget anywhere on the screen you like. It even makes the (very cool) "splash" as you let go of it.

Admittedly, they sit on top of all other apps and don't turn up in the Command-TAB list but it's a start :)

Simon

As Simon said, WebKit has a bunch of non-standard extensions that have been added to support writing Dashboard widgets. There's a "canvas" API that exposes 2d drawing methods via Javascript. There are also a couple of non-standard form elements such as the OS X-standard search input field.

This caused a bit of a stir amongst web standards advocates when it was first announced, because some see it as a return to the 'bad old days' of each vendor pushing their own browser-specific code. On the other hand, there are already moves to support the canvas API in Mozilla.

I suppose you should be able to just make a simple "DHTML application host" which basically just hosts a DHTML application on an invisible window using WebKit. Then it would show up on Command-TAB, the dock and so forth.

Admittedly some stuff is definitely easier to do with Cocoa but there is actually a big range of applications which are easier to build with DHTML. So it's cool to have the option...

Judging from the sheer mass of widgets you can get for Konfabulator that programming style must be very productive.

Even more stuff to get dusty Windows users jealous... ;-)

Of course, Konfabulator is also available for Windows, has a larger range of widgets, better quality than the current Dashboard widgets IMHO, etc...

Still, I'm not convinced the Dashboard stuff adds any real value... Sure, they look nice, but they're mostly eye candy.

Like Simon, I've yet to see anything in Tiger that warrants the price tag so far.

Windows has done this for years! (And it's not often you get to say that).

Seriously, all that Active Desktop stuff is powered by DHTML. And you can do some pretty funky stuff as it gives you access to many of the Direct-X APIs, such as DirectDraw and Direct3D. For example, you could wrap a web browser around a bounching sphere, just with a bit of JavaScript.

But Macs are sexier ;)

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